Some important changes to Project Releases

Posted by Peter Tanner on May 8, 2012

Until recently, the “In Catalog” field
in the Project and Release pages normally displayed “No”. This has now
been fixed – at least for the individual project releases. So now you
can tell, on a release by release basis, if it has gone through the IP
verification process, and has had its documentation and functionality checked.

The "In Catalog" field for
projects is still bogus - and will eventually be removed - as the verification
process is based on releases - not on projects.

Companies that have processes that vet
open source for internal use or for use within their products, should stick
to OpenNTF code that is in the Catalog. Such code is more likely to meet
their vetting requirements.

A little background here. In 2009, we
went through a process to bring some rigor to the OpenNTF. We wanted to
provide a means where users could have some assurance that OpenNTF projects
had been checked to ensure that the code was licensed in a manner that
permitted them to use the code, did not have components with conflicting
licenses, and was submitted by those who had authority to do so. But we
didn't want to hobble the ability for contributors to post their submissions.
So, after a couple of months of community discussions, we came up with
an IP
Policy with the following set
of rules:

– All contributors have to be covered
by a contribution agreement (based on the Apache contribution agreements).– Contributions must be under either
the Apache 2.0 software license, or one of the GPL3 family of licenses.
– We would have 2 Catalogs, one
for Apache-licensed projects,
the other for GPL/LGPL/AGPL-licensed
projects. – And of course the IP vetting process
was established

We have moved slowly to enforce the
policy – partly to ease the transition. First we established the Catalogs,
and vetted many of the projects so that they could be placed into them.
Second, the infrastructure was changed so that you could not post a release
unless you were covered by a contribution agreement. And now we have made
it easier to see if releases are in a Catalog.

Over the next few months, more changes
are coming to the OpenNTF project and release pages – including the ability
to have private working areas for you and your team to work on a project.
More on this in my next blog entry.